Cold Case Muncie: Who killed Sam Drummer?

Sam Drummer was an Indiana All-Star for the Northside High School Titans in 1975, and later played professionally for the Harlem Globetrotters. The local basketball legend was fatally shot in Muncie's Whitely neighborhood in 1995. The case remains unsolved.(Photo: Ashley L. Conti/The Star Press)Buy Photo

Upon his arrival in Ball Memorial Hospital's emergency room — about 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 4, 1995 — frantic efforts began to save the life of a 38-year-old man who had been found a few minutes earlier in a wrecked vehicle in Muncie's Whitely neighborhood.

Emergency medical technicians at the crash scene noted what appeared to be a small bullet wound in the unresponsive victim's upper left chest. Resuscitation efforts continued on the ride to the hospital, but the man's pulse, described as "very weak" when he was removed from his car, continued to grow fainter.

After a surgeon was able to open the patient's chest, he realized a bullet had pierced the man's heart.

Efforts were made to suture the torn heart, but the wounds were quickly found to be "unrepairable, and the patient was unable to be resuscitated," according to a medical report.

The man on that operating table — Sam Drummer, who two decades earlier had been one of the most spectacularly skilled high school basketball players in Muncie history — was pronounced dead at 2:05 a.m., two minutes short of an hour after emergency dispatchers first received calls about the vehicle crash near Kirk Street and Macedonia Avenue.

Word of Drummer's death spread quickly through the city that morning.

For many, it marked a tragic conclusion to a saga that began in the 1970s with the local basketball legend's exploits for the Northside High School Titans. It would later take a sad turn, as poor decisions, bad advice and eventual substance abuse derailed Drummer's hopes for NBA stardom.

But this story is not about basketball.

It is instead about the events surrounding Sam Drummer's homicide, which remains unsolved after more than 18 years.

It is a case in which authorities for years have known much of what took place on that cold winter night — Drummer was shot as he drove away from the Parkview Apartments public housing complex after he failed to pay someone, presumably his killer, for crack cocaine.

But since 1995, police have lacked the evidence necessary to make an arrest.

That doesn't mean there haven't been discussions — among those who lived in Whitely in the 1990s, and others — about who killed the former basketball star. But first-hand information has not been shared with police.

"That seems to happen a lot," city police Sgt. Mike Engle said last week. "They'll talk to each other, but they are not willing to put anything on paper, or give a statement."

Click here to see past stories in the series "Cold Case: Muncie."

A violent time and place

Drug-related shootings were anything but a rarity in Muncie, especially in and near the city's public housing complexes, in the mid-1990s.

Four other people were shot and wounded — but not killed — in such incidents in February 1995.

Two days before Drummer's slaying, two people had been shot in the Munsyana Homes complex along South Madison Street.

While a cocaine-related arrest in South America had ended Drummer's career with the Harlem Globetrotters in 1980, the former basketball star had not been in trouble with local law enforcement since his return to Muncie.

The night of his killing, the only eyewitness that police found was an "extremely intoxicated" man who had also been buying drugs in the area of Parkview Apartments. He maintained Drummer had been shot as he tried to leave without paying for crack cocaine he had been given.

That man was apparently unable to identify the gunman, however.

Medical records reflect the single bullet fired from a .25-caliber handgun struck Drummer's liver and right lung after passing through his heart.

Drummer's car, apparently southbound on Brady Street when he was wounded, then traveled southeast, crossing a vacant lot before slamming into a parked car in the 1700 block of East Kirk Street.

Investigators said the shooting victim's 1985 Chevrolet Lumina might have been traveling in excess of 50 mph at the time of impact.

Other than the one intoxicated eyewitness, authorities found few other people who acknowledged being outside at 1 a.m. on what was a chilly winter night, with temperatures in the low 20s.

"The only people who were outside were going to or from somewhere," then-Deputy Police Chief Robert Weller told reporters.

The lack of cooperating witnesses aside, the Muncie Police Department did receive several calls from tipsters, although not with "the type of information we can use in court," Weller said.

"We ran into a lot of people who talked to people who talked to somebody's brother," Weller would say a few weeks later. "We have a lot of third- and fourth-hand information.

"I think there are people in the community that know exactly what happened that night. They're not the people coming forward."

That July, Police Chief Ralph McGairk said his officers had "swept through" neighborhoods where drug crimes were frequent, seeking witnesses and possible suspects in cases that included the Drummer slaying.

On the first anniversary of Drummer's death, then-MPD Lt. Norm Irelan said his department had a half-dozen suspects in the slaying, describing two of them as "prime suspects."

'When the nightmare begins'

Sam Drummer's two oldest daughters, Carol and Santana — who were 12 and 9, respectively, when their father died — do not dispute his slaying was drug-related, although they recall him as a loving father who never used drugs or appeared impaired in their presence.

"Not at all," Santana said. "We couldn't tell at all."

They have since learned, however, that not long before his death, Sam Drummer had drawn the antagonism of a local cocaine dealer over an unpaid debt.

Another family member paid that debt, Drummer's daughters said, and urged that dealer to no longer sell drugs to the former basketball star.

Drummer's autopsy report indicates he was intoxicated — with a blood-alcohol content of 0.104 percent, just above the legal limit for motorists in 1995 — when he was shot, and also had cocaine and marijuana in his system.

A former Muncie resident who asked that his name not be used in this story told The Star Press that he and Sam Drummer smoked crack cocaine together about an hour before the slaying.

The man — whose presence in the Whitely neighborhood that night is confirmed in 1995 police reports — said he urged Drummer to call it a night as they parted, but that advice was apparently ignored.

"When you are smoking cocaine (and) you are out of money, that is when the nightmare begins," he said.

In the mid-1990s, he recalled, Parkview Apartments "from dusk to dawn" was a "no-man's land unless you were a veteran of the streets with a resume of criminal activity."

"Sam Drummer was not a criminal," the man added, recalling his friend instead as a "gentle giant (who) thrilled us all with his immense talent."

'Street cred'

City police Sgt. Engle, who recently reviewed the large file — actually a box containing several files his department maintains on the Drummer case — said he still holds out hope the slaying could one day be solved.

"Absolutely," he said last week. "If somebody would just come forward ..."

Engle said it appeared detectives on the case in the immediate wake of the murder were frustrated by a number of false confessions — made to friends, not to police — by young men seeking "street cred" by claiming to have committed such a high-profile crime.

Investigation of those claims resulted in quick retractions once police became involved.

"Street cred" of another sort also is believed to have hampered the investigation.

According to Engle, one of the men who has been mentioned as possibly being involved in the Drummer slaying — at the very least as an eyewitness — is seemingly feared by many of his acquaintances, who are unwilling to discuss his activities with authorities.

Investigators hoped witnesses in the Drummer case might come forward when that man — and another Muncie man who has frequently been mentioned as the possible assailant — went to prison for cocaine-dealing convictions.

The men's temporary exiles from Muncie didn't produce any breaks in the 1995 homicide, however.

'Just tell the truth'

Drummer's five children haven't achieved the feeling of closure that would come with knowing for certain who killed their father.

"I just feel I would be at peace," Santana said.

Carol, meanwhile, said she wished people "would just tell the truth" about the events of Feb. 4, 1995.

"He's the one that has to live with that every day," she said of the as-yet uncharged gunman.

In Carol's house on Muncie's south side, the sisters remain matter-of-fact as they talk about their father and his absence from their life. Both say they strayed from the straight-and-narrow without a strong father figure.

"It was like we went to the streets," Santana said.

They said they don't often visit their father's grave in Gardens of Memory, a cemetery north of Muncie.

"I can't bring myself to do it," Santana said.

They say they've made peace with the way their father is remembered: A gifted man who squandered opportunities before losing his life.